Australian scientists have made an extraordinary discovery from an incredible distance
CSIRO’s Keith Bannister, with Swinburne U’s Adam Deller and Ryan Shannon have detected the origin of a single intense, fast radio burst from 4bn light-years away – nobody knows what caused it but these blokes worked out where it comes from.
This is a very big deal indeed among astronomers, demonstrating the sort of science delivered by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope (in remote WA). It identified a radiation pulse emitted billions of years ago, which lasted a thousandth of a second.
CMM has no clue about the science but remembers British cosmologist Fred Hoyle’s 18th century (in pop culture years) TV drama A for Andromeda, in which signals from another galaxy portend no good.